The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation eBook

“You observe,” said the chief quietly,
“you can’t fail to observe that the writing
in the register, is not the writing of the card pinned
on the door of Number 27. They are quite different.
The writing of Frank Herman in the register is in
thick, stunted strokes; the writing on the card is
in thin, angular, what are commonly called crabbed
strokes. Yet it is supposed that Herman put that
card outside his bedroom door. How is it, then,
that Herman’s handwriting was thick and stunted
when he registered at seven o’clock and slender
and a bit shaky when he wrote this card at, say, half-past
ten or eleven? Of course, Herman, or whatever
his real name is, never wrote the line on that card,
and never pinned that card on his door!”

The landlord opened his heavy lips and gasped:
the landlady sighed with a gradually awakening interest.
Amidst a dead silence the chief went on with his critical
inspection of the handwriting.

“But now look at the signature of the man who
called himself John Barcombe, of Manchester.
You will observe that he signed that name in a great,
sprawling hand across the page, and that the letters
slope from left to right, downward, instead of in
the usually accepted fashion of left to right, upward.
Now at first sight there is no great similarity in
the writing of that entry in the register and that
on the card—­one is rounded and sprawling,
and the other is thin and precise. But there is
one remarkable and striking similarity. In the
entry in the register there are two a’s—­the
a in Barcombe, the a in Manchester. On the one
line on the card found pinned to the door there are
also two a’s—­the a in please; the
a in call. Now observe—­whether the
writing is big, sprawling, thin, precise; feigned,
obviously, in one case, natural, I think, in the other,
all those four a’s are the same! This man
has grown so accustomed to making his a’s after
the Greek fashion—­a—­done in one
turn of the pen—­that he has made them even
in his feigned handwriting! There’s not
a doubt, to my mind, that the card found on Herman’s
door was written, and put on that door, by the man
who registered as John Barcombe. And,”
he added in an undertone to Allerdyke, “I’ve
no doubt, either, that he’s the man of the Eastbourne
Terrace affair.”

The landlord had risen to his feet, and was scowling
gloomily at everybody.

“Then you are making it out to be murder?”
he exclaimed sulkily. “Just what I expected!
Never had police called in yet without ’em making
mountains out of molehills! Murder, indeed!—­nothing
but a case of suicide, that’s what I say.
And as this is a temperance hotel, and not a licensed
house, I’ll be obliged to you if you’ll
have that body taken away to the mortuary—­I
shall be having the character of my place taken away
next, and then where shall I be I should like to know!”

He swung indignantly out of the room, and his wife,
murmuring that it was certainly very hard on innocent
people that these things went on, followed him.
The police, giving no heed to these protests, proceeded
to examine the articles taken from the dead man’s
clothing. Whatever had been the object of the
murderer, it was certainly not robbery. There
was a purse and a pocket-book, containing a considerable
amount of money in gold and notes; a good watch and
chain, and a ring or two of some value.